“Are we in the right place? Can we check our coordinates?”
“Not while we’re inside the Binder, Jim,” Hendron answers me. “It’s a self-contained constant, remember? It exists apart from the space-time we know. So there’s literally nothing outside those curved walls while we’re inside them. And when we leave the Binder, this tunnel doesn’t exist to us anymore. It can’t be seen or measured in any way from the outside, because it’s not part of our space-time.”
“Except when it goes through a sun,” I remind her, to show that I was paying attention back in the Hex. “When it collects gravitational energy.”
“Correct. But this journey we've just taken proves we've barely scratched the surface of how this thing works. That’s an embarrassing thing to admit after a century of science, but whoever built it had to have been millions of years ahead of us. Imagine the technology it would take to permanently join two stars together with a subway tube. You’d have to take into account the relative motions of the suns, their heat and radiation, the intense gravity, all the planets and asteroids and other space junk in between, not to mention the sheer distance involved. It’s so far beyond our capabilities it’s untrue. Yet here we are, riding first class across the galaxy. Kinda makes you proud, doesn’t it?”
Maybe after I’ve rescued Mum. “Yes, O’see. Do you think we should make contact with Jiminy—I mean our messenger?” I shrink a little, knowing she heard that. It’s such a childish name, and all I want right now is to be taken seriously, to show the O’see and Thorpe-Campbell that they were right to bring me all this way. I can do this. I can do this!
“Jiminy Cricket—nice. That can be his official name.” She isn’t fooling. Between us, we transmit the following: “We are ready to lower ourselves down to the planet’s surface using thruster rigs. Some rigs will be unmanned. They will carry necessary supplies and weapons.”
UNDERSTOOD — WE WILL WAIT HERE UNTIL JAMES TRILLION AND OTHERS HAVE LANDED SAFELY — BE CAREFUL
CHAPTER 23
The Dark Sea
It’s only the second world I’ve set foot on officially and already I miss the first. It has no name yet. As a planet it’s large and angry. Quite a bit bigger than Mars, with a gravity of about 1.6, which might not sound much, but, I can assure you, it makes all the difference. Earth’s gravity is 1. Mars’s is 0.38. So the gravity here is about four times stronger than I’m used to. Human muscles take time to adapt, and they don’t have a lot of leeway. After about an hour of fooling myself it’s just a matter of will power, I find I can barely stand. Frequent rests will be essential. Hendron insists on a higher-than-usual protein and glucose diet, to build our muscle mass and keep our energy levels high.
It’s mostly twilight here. The system has twin suns, but they’re both fairly dim. I’ve lost count of the number of moons in orbit around us. None are very big. Four are fully intact. The rest are more like charred chunks broken off a larger moon. You can see the pieces better when they pass in front of one of the suns in silhouette; they resemble a kind of asteroid belt, but some of them are shaped so bizarrely you can almost see how they’d fit back together if you had to do a celestial jigsaw.
The planet’s surface is bleak but quite varied. To the west is a colossal mountain range that we couldn’t conquer with a million tasker harpoons. The rest of this part of the world is flattish, covered with a layer of tiny, sharp brown gravel rocks. Whenever I touch the ground with my glove, a hundred of them cling to it.
Hendron points out they’re not rocks but the remains of creatures—possibly sea creatures—whose shells are covered with microscopic thorns shaped like hooks. So where’s the sea? Lohengrin isn’t ruling out a giant tidal wave that deposited them here, but I’m kinda thinking his imagination’s chewed through its own leash.
It is a bizarre place, though. The red glow from veins of lava criss-crossing the bedrock to the south-east gives off a strangely inviting vibe. Vicious lightning strikes on the upper mountain peaks are a constant distraction. So are the coloured moons. One glows blue-green, the other a very cool blue-grey, while the other two glitter and sparkle as though they’re made up of pink ice crystals.
“Over here—I think these might be rover tracks.” Sergei waves us to a spot in the dark shells roughly east-north-east. The O’see is having a bit of trouble with her console adapter, so she tells us to stay nearby until she can fix it. Without Jiminy’s guidance, we’re not wise to venture out. Pinocchio found that out the hard way.
Tired, Lys and Rachel sit back to back near one of the gigs. These aren’t the same as our apparatuses, but they’re close in size and number; fourteen here, as opposed to the Hex’s eleven. There’s no walled enclosure. Where the central gig would be in the Hex, there’s just empty space here. Empty, that is, except for the bones of a large creature half-buried in the sea of shells. Not a Finagler this time—something much bigger. The site here is elliptical, not hexagonal. It feels totally exposed.
“Any news on the atmosphere, Dad?”
“Yeah. High methane, carbon dioxide. Traces of oxygen, nitrogen, xenon and other gases. No sign of alien pathogens yet, but we've only just got here. Keep your helmet on or you’re grounded.” He tosses her a wink, then goes back to setting up the oxygen tent, a large airtight dome made of atom-aligning fabric. It’s surprisingly rigid when it’s up. We’ll have to use it whenever we need to remove our helmets for eating or sleeping. He gets Lohengrin to help him bolt the pegs into the bedrock under the shells, then it’s just a case of purging the air from the central chamber and filling it with O2 instead.
This is our base camp. I call it that because, though we’re not mountaineers, any walking we do in 1.6 gravity feels like an uphill hike.
“Okay, we’re up and running,” the O’see announces. “Jiminy should be online...now.”
Our dragonfly host hasn’t shown himself since we left the Binder.
Hendron keeps it very simple. We don’t get much from him this time, except that base camp, or more accurately this ellipse under the Binder, is the only place we’ll be safe.
“Why is that?” Hendron asks him.
BECAUSE OTHERS LIKE US ARE AFRAID OF THE BINDER — THE BINDER KILLED OUR MASTER
“Who was your master?”
HIS NAME CAN ONLY BE SPOKEN SONICALLY.So we get a few bars of strange atonal music. HIS SKELETON STILL LIES UNDER THE GREAT TRANSIT
The rest of us go for a closer look, but Thorpe-Campbell stops us from getting too near the remains. I guess he's right. We don’t know anything about what we’re dealing with on this planet.
Hendron asks Jiminy what we're supposed to do next. But instead of coming down to show us, he stays inside the Binder and offers a rather dubious, not to mention cryptic, piece of advice: FOLLOW THE TRACKS — OBSERVE INGOL FOR YOURSELVES — DO NOT PROVOKE THOSE LIKE US
The O’see asks what we should do after we’ve scouted.
FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE CONTACT WITH INGOL
It’s like they say: ask a stupid question...
On top of being thoroughly unhelpful, Jiminy now decides it’s a good idea for him to leave us altogether, so he can RECALL OTHERS LIKE US READY FOR THE FREEING OF INGOL
“Why do I feel like we got the crap end of this deal?” notes Sergei.
“I don't like it,” answers Hendron. “If he's reluctant to come down here, where does that leave us?”
“Up lava creek.” Thorpe-Campbell points to where the rover tracks might lead us if they keep going straight—a red glow far off in the distance. “And you girls think you’re tired now. Wait till you’ve slogged ten miles in this gravity.”
Lys and Rachel groan.
“Well, I suppose a short recce can't hurt,” says the O’see. “Everyone, check your suit gauges as I read mine out. If any one of yours is significantly different from mine, shout out. Your life could depend on it.” She runs through the O2, pressure, temperature, recycle capacity and drinking fluid readouts. Lohengrin points out a low percentage
on his oxygen gauge, so Hendron swaps his tank for one of the spares. Other than that we’re in decent shape.
The O’see furnishes Sergei, Lys and Rachel with sidearms—some kind of pulse weapon—because they’ve all had some experience firing them. Lohengrin and I get zilch. That peeves me a little, especially after my performance with the harpoon gun, but this is only a recce. Hendron doesn’t want to take chances.
Thorpe-Campbell wastes no time in leading us out over the sea of dark shells. He’s armed, of course, as is the O’see. I think about the countless times he must have done this—taking the first steps on an alien world. It offers a slight comfort. He’s still here, after all. The rest of us keep to roughly the same formation for the first mile or so: Sergei and I just behind him, followed by Lohengrin on his own, then the girls, Lys and Rachel, and finally Hendron bringing up the rear.
The shells are loose and crunchy underfoot. In some of the craters we sink almost to our kneecaps, and it’s like wading through a swamp of walnuts. The noise we’re making is ridiculous. We couldn’t sneak up on a fossil.
Speaking of which, the riddle of the alien skeleton back at base camp has everyone a little jittery. Why would the Binder have killed him?
“I have a hard time believing it killed him,” says Thorpe-Campbell. “But the Binder doesn’t let just anything in.”
“What doesn’t it let in?” asks Lohengrin.
“Anything highly destructive. We tried taking a cache of nuclear bombs through to another port. We were going to detonate them in the atmosphere, to help kick-start the terraforming process. But we couldn’t get them into the Binder. The portal kept forcing them back out. We had to give it up.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to Jiminy’s master,” suggests Lys. “He tried to take something dangerous into the Binder and it wouldn’t let him. But it was something crucial he needed to survive. Or something like that.”
“That was my first thought as well,” her dad says. “Which is why I didn’t want any of you going near that skeleton. If the Binder didn’t let him through, he’s probably carrying something very dangerous. From what we understand, the Finaglers have been trying to find a way into the Binder for ages, but it won't let them in. It seems to know they're up to no good.”
I shudder through a flashback of the island of rings. “You're not kidding.”
“Jiminy should have warned us,” says Lohengrin.
“Jiminy should have done a lot of things,” replies Sergei. “But there’s no use crying about it now.”
“Who’s crying?”
No one answers that. We trudge on through the sea of shells, following the rover tracks into the unknown.
When two or more moons are in the sky together, they give off a fair amount of light. The colours combine in eerie ways. The changes affect my mood in subtle ways. For a while the atmosphere feels sick and grim, a kind of grimy yellow-green, the next it perks up with a rose-tinted blush. Owing to their chaotic orbits, the sky is rarely moonless, but when it is, and the suns have set as well, the planet’s surface is pitch black and pretty terrifying.
It’s during one of these dark gaps that Lohengrin points out the stars overhead. How many of them there are, like ten times as many as I’m used to. How quickly they seem to wheel across the sky—a day here lasts about nineteen Core hours. And how there isn’t a single recognisable constellation anywhere. That idea freaks me out, just like it did on the island of rings, and I don’t mind telling them. I hate feeling like I’m so far from home even the stars can’t find me.
“You’ll get used to that,” Thorpe-Campbell assures me. “It’s empowering after a while. It frees you up. You stop thinking that you need to belong somewhere, or that you’re bound by old human limitations. Anything you need to survive you can take with you. You just are. A self-contained explorer. Just think of the stars as friends. You’ll lose old ones, meet new ones. And the constant ones will always be there.”
“Where do you think of as home, sir?” I ask him.
“Earth. Always will. I was born there, raised there. But do you know what, Jim? I don’t want to die there. And if you ask me we need to leave that kind of backward thinking behind. It’s not who we are any more. Tying ourselves to one place, giving our lives for it: that’s caveman thinking.”
I recall what Abs and her nephew, Mayor Prendergast, said to us about their mining home, Gunther’s Folly: It’s only rocks and dust. It still strikes me as an odd attitude for a family of settlers. Now Thorpe-Campbell is taking it one step further, saying it’s backward to want to have a permanent home.
“What about your family?” I ask him.
“What about them?”
“What if they don’t want to keep moving? What if they turn round one day and say they want to spend the rest of their lives at Alpha?”
“That’s their choice.”
“But you’d leave them?”
“I’d always come back to them. Family is family, wherever they choose to live. But I doubt if I’ll ever settle, not now. I thought having a daughter might change my mind, but it just made the prospect of exploring even more exciting, if I’m honest, because I’d get to do it with her someday. And look, here she is, already pushing the envelope.” The swell of pride in his voice makes me like him all over again.
“Sir, do you think I’ll be like you?”
“In what way, Jim?”
“Being out here. Not needing a—”
Sergei interrupts us with a cry of “Stay to the left! Watch where you’re walking!”
I freeze, scan the ground to my right. Shells, shells and more shells. The Minsk Machine can see something I can’t.
“There’s a crevasse.” He motions to a shallow depression running through the shells a couple of metres to our right, not quite parallel with the rover tracks. “And there—can you see?” He’s almost frantic as he follows it up the hill ahead. It’s been a gradual incline for the past ten minutes or so, but now it steepens. Sergei’s uphill scrabbling is impressive. His stamina really has come on since joining the Hex.
He stops, crouches at the top of the rise. The rest of us dig our splayed boots into the cascading shells to keep our footing as we inch up after him. It sucks my energy like nothing I’ve experienced. By the time I summit the little slope, it feels as though I’m wearing a skycab.
Sergei was right about the crevasse! He’s crouched a stride away from where it’s given way at some point. A large chunk of black volcanic rock lies at the bottom of a steep verge below. The verge is part of an enormous, bowl-shaped crater measuring at least three miles in diameter. We’re on its rim. The far side of the crater is in perpetual shadow. It’s sheltered by the weirdest rock formation I’ve ever seen. A colossal obsidian wave, petrified in mid-fall, hangs over the crater like an impending torrent of doom.
“We’ve found the rover.” Sergei points us to the bottom of the slope, to a tiny silver frame glimmering in the moonlight, not far from the collapsed chunk of rock. “They must have veered too near the edge, didn’t realise they were on an overhang.”
Using the spectrometer function on her omnipod headset, the O’see scans the wreckage and rubble below, then carefully explores every inch of the crater.
“Should we go down?” asks Sergei.
“I’m not sure,” answers Hendron. “I’m getting an odd reading from that shadowed area. Energy signatures that make no sense. Almost like...like there’s an entire metropolis down there.”
“What was that?” Thorpe-Campbell takes a step too near the edge in his attempt to reach her, dislodges a couple of rocks. Luckily they don’t cause much of an avalanche on their way down.
“Be careful!” she snaps. “We don’t want to disturb...whatever’s going on over there.”
“Describe it to us,” he says. “Are there life-forms?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. All I can tell you is there are intense patterns of radiometry, spanning a wide array of wavelengths—infrared, X-ray, ultraviolet, and
definitely some within the visible spectrum. They’re in constant flux. But the general shape...I’ll be damned if those aren’t towers and buildings...and bridges.”
“Bridges?” Lys’s turn to voice our confusion. “Over what?”
“Beats me. I’ve never seen anything like it. Some kind of building project, unfinished, but in progress as we speak. The patterns are changing all the time. Whatever the structures are, they’re solid, but also translucent—some light passes through them. It’s bizarre. As sure as I’m standing here, I’m telling you, there’s a city down there.”
We watch in silence for a while. Absent any concrete visuals, my imagination takes over, painting outrageous skyscrapers and sports stadia and lakes and grassy picnic areas in an altogether litter-free utopia. Kind of a lot for a few shadowy acres to live up to.
“Okay then, let’s go take a look.” That isn’t an idle suggestion. Thorpe-Campbell’s already traversing the rim, heading for the eastern slope, which isn’t quite as steep. The rest of us aren’t as gung-ho, however. While I can’t argue with his logic—we won’t know anything unless we get a closer look—to just march down there and ring the doorbell in broad daylight—okay, twilight—isn’t the smartest move I can think of.
“Who’s coming?” he asks.
“I think we should stay here,” says Hendron. “You go, Charlie. See what you can see. But not too close.”
“Hang on! Me and Jim are coming.” Sergei plucks me onto my feet and practically drags me along the rim after Thorpe-Campbell.
“Sergei, what the hell!”
“We didn’t come all this way to watch from the side-lines, Trillion.”
“I know, but just give me a minute. Jesus.”
The O’see storms after us but halts part way, fists on hips. “Sergei, that’s far enough for—ah, hell, you’re right. I want a closer look myself anyway. And whoever’s down there must have seen us by now. Okay, we stick together, all of us, no matter what. Let’s move.”
Star Binder Page 29